A thousand years of kingdoms, caliphates, steppe empires and trading cities between the fall of Rome and the voyages that joined the hemispheres.
Ancient DNA from graves dated 1338 near Lake Issyk-Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, put the Black Death's source strain at the root of the plague family tree.
· 1347A one-line colophon dates the Jikji's metal-type printing to 1377 at Heungdeoksa in Cheongju. Its only surviving volume is at the BnF in Paris.
· 1377In 2012 Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo rocked a 5-ton replica moai upright with 18 people and three ropes. The road statues, the forest debate and the 1860s.
· 1400From 1405 to 1433 the Yongle emperor's eunuch admiral led seven fleets from China to East Africa. Why they ended is argued: cost, Mongols, court politics.
· 1405Ulugh Beg's observatory at Samarkand held an arc of about 40 m radius. Its star tables were finished by 1440; he was put to death on October 25, 1449.
· 1429A Herat envoy reached Vijayanagara in April 1443 and described seven walls, rose bazaars and elephant stables. The city was sacked after January 23, 1565.
· 1443The Sejong Sillok records 28 new letters in 1443 and a finished Hunminjeongeum in 1446, with Choe Malli's 1444 memorial of protest between them.
· 1446A 2021 Antiquity study dated Machu Picchu's occupation to about 1420, before Pachacuti's 1438 accession. Yale returned its collection to Peru by 2012.
· 1450Mehmed II took Constantinople on May 29, 1453, with a giant cannon, ships hauled overland past the harbor chain, and 53 days against under 5,000 defenders.
· 1453A notary's record of November 6, 1455, is the only contemporary source for the Gutenberg Bible, printed at Mainz in about 180 copies; 49 are known.
· 1455Morocco took Timbuktu in 1591 and exiled its scholars in 1594. In 2016 the ICC sentenced Al Mahdi for ten sites wrecked in 2012. The books are online.
· 1591From 1966 to 1973 David Whitehouse dug Siraf, a Persian Gulf port, and found Chinese stoneware in a mosque platform of about 800. Its end is still argued.
· 1966
